...various other thoughts on sports, politics and whatever else is new in my life.

Wednesday, October 3, 2012

First month in a new home

I can say that almost everything about owning a home has kind of met expectations. Do I enjoy being part of a neighborhood? Yes. Do I struggle with basic home-owner tasks? Yes. Am I getting better? Slowly, but yes. It is nice to finally have a place to call our own here. When looking at the advantages of buying a home compared to rent one one thing we focused on was finally being able to put roots down in Columbus. We still miss Minneapolis, but things here should hopefully get better now that we have a place to entertain friends (like they say on all those HGTV shows) and meet neighbors.

The good and somewhat surprising thing about owning this home is the feeling that we have so much space. If you followed the home search you know that we fluctuated between very large (very expensive) homes and smaller, less expensive homes. At first we were under contract on the large/expensive home, but when that fell through we decided to pivot to the smaller type of homes. The great thing about all of this is that the smaller home doesn't feel small. It is amazing how much bigger this home is after going from a 2 bedroom duplex and then more recently one bedroom of borrowed space. We have ample room and don't feel constrained at all by the size of the place. Now that all might change in the future, but at the time things seem pretty good.

As for the basic home-owner tasks there are a few things that we've needed to work on. I'm trying to get better about 1) learning how to do stuff and 2) not becoming frustrated by failure to do stuff. The second one is especially important, since I've kind of been like Steve Jobs when faced with an obstacle. It doesn't really help anyone when I say stuff like "it should just work" because unlike Steve Jobs I don't have the power to actually get somebody to make it work. The good news is that M and I put together a bookcase on Saturday morning in pretty good time and even better spirits.
Anyway, below are the pictures of our place: